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8/9/2019 Why Academics' Writing Stinks - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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The Chronicle Review

September 26, 2014

Why Academics Stink at Writing By Steven Pinker

ogether with wearing earth tones, driving Priuses, and having

a foreign policy, the most conspicuous trait of the American

professoriate may be the prose style called academese. An editorial

cartoon by Tom Toles shows a bearded academic at his desk

offering the following explanation of why SAT verbal scores are at

an all-time low: "Incomplete implementation of strategized

programmatics designated to maximize acquisition of awareness

and utilization of communications skills pursuant to standardized

review and assessment of languaginal development." In a similar

vein, Bill Watterson has the 6-year-old Calvin titling his homework

assignment "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological

Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational

Gender Modes," and exclaiming to Hobbes, his tiger companion,

"Academia, here I come!"

No honest professor can deny that there’s something to the

stereotype. When the late Denis Dutton (founder of the Chronicle -

owned Arts & Letters Daily) ran an annual Bad Writing Contest to

celebrate "the most stylistically lamentable passages found in

scholarly books and articles," he had no shortage of nominations,

and he awarded the prizes to some of academe’s leading lights.

But the familiarity of bad academic writing raises a puzzle. Why

should a profession that trades in words and dedicates itself to the

transmission of knowledge so often turn out prose that is turgid,

soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and

impossible to understand?

The most popular answer outside the academy is the cynical one:

Bad writing is a deliberate choice. Scholars in the softer fields

spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to

say. They dress up the trivial and obvious with the trappings of scientific sophistication, hoping to bamboozle their audiences

with highfalutin gobbledygook.

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Though no doubt the bamboozlement theory applies to some

academics some of the time, in my experience it does not ring true.

I know many scholars who have nothing to hide and no need to

impress. They do groundbreaking work on important subjects,

reason well about clear ideas, and are honest, down-to-earth

people. Still, their writing stinks.

The most popular answer inside the academy is the self-serving

one: Difficult writing is unavoidable because of the abstractness

and complexity of our subject matter. Every human pastime—

music, cooking, sports, art—develops an argot to spare its

enthusiasts from having to use a long-winded description every

time they refer to a familiar concept in one another’s company. It

would be tedious for a biologist to spell out the meaning of the

term transcription factor every time she used it, and so we should

not expect the tête-à-tête among professionals to be easily

understood by amateurs.

But the insider-shorthand theory, too, doesn’t fit my experience. I

suffer the daily experience of being baffled by articles in my field,

my subfield, even my sub-sub-subfield. The methods section of an

experimental paper explains, "Participants read assertions whose

veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent

presentation of an assessment word." After some detective work, Idetermined that it meant, "Participants read sentences, each

followed by the word true or false." The original academese was

not as concise, accurate, or scientific as the plain English

translation. So why did my colleague feel compelled to pile up the

polysyllables?

A third explanation shifts the blame to entrenched authority.

People often tell me that academics have no choice but to write

badly because the gatekeepers of journals and university presses

insist on ponderous language as proof of one’s seriousness. This

has not been my experience, and it turns out to be a myth. In

Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard University Press, 2012), Helen

Sword masochistically analyzed the literary style in a sample of 500

scholarly articles and found that a healthy minority in every field

were written with grace and verve.

Instead of moralistic finger-pointing or evasive blame-shifting,perhaps we should try to understand academese by engaging in

what academics do best: analysis and explanation. An insight from

literary analysis and an insight from cognitive science go a long


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It's No Joke: Humor Rarely Welcome in Research Write-Ups

Examples of funny papers are few and far between. That’s a

shame, says one scientist.

way toward explaining why people who devote their lives to the

world of ideas are so inept at conveying them.

n a brilliant little book called Clear and Simple as the Truth , the

literary scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner argue

that every style of writing can be understood as a model of the

communication scenario that an author simulates in lieu of the

real-time give-and-take of a conversation. They distinguish, in

particular, romantic, oracular, prophetic, practical, and plain

styles, each defined by how the writer imagines himself to be

related to the reader, and what the writer is trying to accomplish.

(To avoid the awkwardness of strings of he or she , I borrow a

convention from linguistics and will refer to a male generic writer

and a female generic reader.) Among those styles is one they single

out as an aspiration for writers of expository prose. They call it

classic style , and they credit its invention to 17th-century French

essayists such as Descartes and La Rochefoucauld.

The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The

writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and

he orients the reader so she can see for herself. The purpose of

writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It

succeeds when it aligns language with truth, the proof of success

being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known and is not thesame as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the

world. The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he

is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. The

writer and the reader are equals: The reader can recognize the

truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed

view. And the process of directing the reader’s gaze takes the form

of a conversation.

Most academic writing, in contrast, is a blend of two styles. The

first is practical style, in which the writer’s goal is to satisfy a

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reader’s need for a particular kind of information, and the form of

the communication falls into a fixed template, such as the five-

paragraph student essay or the standardized structure of a

scientific article. The second is a style that Thomas and Turner call

self-conscious, relativistic, ironic, or postmodern, in which "the

writer’s chief, if unstated, concern is to escape being convicted of

philosophical naïveté about his own enterprise."

Thomas and Turner illustrate the contrast as follows:

"When we open a cookbook, we completely put aside—

and expect the author to put aside—the kind of question

that leads to the heart of certain philosophic and religious

traditions. Is it possible to talk about cooking? Do eggs

really exist? Is food something about which knowledge is

possible? Can anyone else ever tell us anything true about

cooking? … Classic style similarly puts aside as

inappropriate philosophical questions about its

enterprise. If it took those questions up, it could never get

around to treating its subject, and its purpose is

exclusively to treat its subject."

It’s easy to see why academics fall into self-conscious style. Their

goal is not so much communication as self-presentation—an

overriding defensiveness against any impression that they may be

slacker than their peers in hewing to the norms of the guild. Many

of the hallmarks of academese are symptoms of this agonizing

self-consciousness:

Metadiscourse. The preceding discussion introduced the problem

of academese, summarized the principle theories, and suggested a

new analysis based on a theory of Turner and Thomas. The rest of

this article is organized as follows. The first section consists of a

review of the major shortcomings of academic prose. …

Are you having fun? I didn’t think so. That tedious paragraph was

filled with metadiscourse—verbiage about verbiage. Thoughtless

writers think they’re doing the reader a favor by guiding her

through the text with previews, summaries, and signposts. In

reality, meta discourse is there to help the writer, not the reader,

since she has to put more work into understanding the signposts

than she saves in seeing what they point to, like directions for a

shortcut that take longer to figure out than the time the shortcut

would save.


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The art of classic prose is to use signposts sparingly, as we do in

conversation, and with a minimum of metadiscourse. Instead of

the self-referential "This chapter discusses the factors that cause

names to rise and fall in popularity," one can pose a question:

"What makes a name rise and fall in popularity?" Or one can co-

opt the guiding metaphor behind classic style—vision. Instead of

"The preceding paragraph demonstrated that parents sometimesgive a boy’s name to a girl, but never vice versa," one can write, "As

we have seen, parents sometimes give a boy’s name to a girl, but

never vice versa." And since a conversation embraces a writer and

reader who are taking in the spectacle together, a classic writer can

refer to them with the good old pronoun we. Instead of "The

previous section analyzed the source of word sounds. This section

raises the question of word meanings," he can write, "Now that we

have explored the source of word sounds, we arrive at the puzzle of

word meanings."

Professional narcissism. Academics live in two universes: the

world of the thing they study (the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, the

development of language in children, the Taiping Rebellion in

China) and the world of their profession (getting articles

published, going to conferences, keeping up with the trends and

gossip). Most of a researcher’s waking hours are spent in the

second world, and it’s easy for him to confuse the two. The result is

the typical opening of an academic paper:

In recent years, an increasing number of psychologists

and linguists have turned their attention to the problem

of child language acquisition. In this article, recent

research on this process will be reviewed.

No offense, but few people are interested in how professors spend

their time. Classic style ignores the hired help and looks directly at

what they are being paid to study:

All children acquire the ability to speak a language

without explicit lessons. How do they accomplish this

feat?

Of course, sometimes the topic of conversation really is the activity

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How Can You Fix Your Writing?

Do you have colleagues, grad students, or friends who could

use a little straight talk about their writing? We've reprinted

Steven A. Pinker's manifesto as part of a handy booklet that's

designed to be shared. And we've got solutions to bad writing,

too: The guide comes with advice from four experts about how

to fix what ails you. It's free; download it by following the link

above.

of researchers, such as an overview intended to introduce graduate

students or other insiders to the scholarly literature. But

researchers are apt to lose sight of whom they are writing for, and

narcissistically describe the obsessions of their federation rather

than what the audience wants to know.

Apologizing. Self-conscious writers are also apt to kvetch about

how what they’re about to do is so terribly difficult and

complicated and controversial:

The problem of language acquisition is extremely

complex. It is difficult to give precise definitions of the

concept of language and the concept of acquisition and

the concept of children. There is much uncertainty about

the interpretation of experimental data and a great deal of

controversy surrounding the theories. More research

needs to be done.

In the classic style, the writer credits the reader with enough

intelligence to realize that many concepts aren’t easy to define,

and that many controversies aren’t easy to resolve. She is there to

see what the writer will do about it.

Shudder quotes. Academics often use quotation marks to distance

themselves from a common idiom, as in "But this is not the ‘take-

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home message,’ " or "She is a ‘quick study’ and has been able to

educate herself in virtually any area that interests her." They seem

to be saying, "I couldn’t think of a more dignified way of putting

this, but please don’t think I’m a flibbertigibbet who talks this way;

I really am a serious scholar."

The problem goes beyond the nose-holding disdain for idiomatic

English. In the second example, taken from a letter of

recommendation, are we supposed to think that the student is a

quick study, or that she is a "quick study"—someone who is

alleged to be a quick study but really isn’t?

Quotation marks have a number of legitimate uses, such as

reproducing someone else’s words (She said, "Fiddlesticks!"),

mentioning a word as a word rather than using it to convey its

meaning (The New York Times uses "millenniums," not

"millennia"), and signaling that the writer does not accept the

meaning of a word as it is being used by others in this context

(They executed their sister to preserve the family’s "honor").

Squeamishness about one’s own choice of words is not among

them.

Hedging. Academics mindlessly cushion their prose with wads of

fluff that imply they are not willing to stand behind what they say.

Those include almost, apparently, comparatively, fairly, in part,

nearly, partially, predominantly, presumably, rather, relatively,

seemingly, so to speak, somewhat, sort of, to a certain degree, to

some extent, and the ubiquitous I would argue. (Does that mean

you would argue for your position if things were different, but are

not willing to argue for it now?)

Consider virtually in the letter of recommendation excerpted

above. Did the writer really mean to say that there are some areas

the student was interested in but didn’t bother to educate herself,

or perhaps that she tried to educate herself in those areas but

lacked the competence to do so? Then there’s the scientist who

showed me a picture of her 4-year-old daughter and beamed, "We

virtually adore her."

Writers use hedges in the vain hope that it will get them off the

hook, or at least allow them to plead guilty to a lesser charge,

should a critic ever try to prove them wrong. A classic writer, in

contrast, counts on the common sense and ordinary charity of his

readers, just as in everyday conversation we know when a speaker


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means in general or all else being equal. If someone tells you that

Liz wants to move out of Seattle because it’s a rainy city, you don’t

interpret him as claiming that it rains there 24 hours a day, seven

days a week, just because he didn’t qualify his statement with

relatively rainy or somewhat rainy . Any adversary who is

intellectually unscrupulous enough to give the least charitable

reading to an unhedged statement will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket of hedged ones anyway.

Sometimes a writer has no choice but to hedge a statement. Better

still, the writer can qualify the statement—that is, spell out the

circumstances in which it does not hold rather than leaving

himself an escape hatch or being coy as to whether he really

means it. If there is a reasonable chance that readers will

misinterpret a statistical tendency as an absolute law, a

responsible writer will anticipate the oversight and qualify the

generalization accordingly. Pronouncements like "Democracies

don’t fight wars," "Men are better than women at geometry

problems," and "Eating broccoli prevents cancer" do not do justice

to the reality that those phenomena consist at most of small

differences in the means of two overlapping bell curves. Since

there are serious consequences to misinterpreting those

statements as absolute laws, a responsible writer should insert a

qualifier like on average or all things being equal, together withslightly or somewhat. Best of all is to convey the magnitude of the

effect and the degree of certainty explicitly, in unhedged

statements such as "During the 20th century, democracies were

half as likely to go to war with one another as autocracies were."

It’s not that good writers never hedge their claims. It’s that their

hedging is a choice, not a tic.

Metaconcepts and nominalizations. A legal scholar writes, "I have

serious doubts that trying to amend the Constitution … would

work on an actual level. … On the aspirational level, however, a

constitutional amendment strategy may be more valuable." What

do the words level and strategy add to a sentence that means, "I

doubt that trying to amend the Constitution would actually

succeed, but it may be valuable to aspire to it"? Those vacuous

terms refer to meta

concepts: concepts about concepts, such as

approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework,

issue, level, model, perspective, process, prospect, role, strategy,

subject, tendency, and variable .

It’s easy to see why metaconcepts tumble so easily from the fingers


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of academics. Professors really do think about "issues" (they can

list them on a page), "levels of analysis" (they can argue about

which is most appropriate), and "contexts" (they can use them to

figure out why something works in one place but not in another).

But after a while those abstractions become containers in which

they store and handle all their ideas, and before they know it they

can no longer call anything by its name. "Reducing prejudice"becomes a "prejudice-reduction model"; "calling the police"

becomes "approaching this subject from a law-enforcement

perspective."

English grammar is an enabler of the bad habit of writing in

unnecessary abstractions because it includes a dangerous tool for

creating abstract terms. A process called nominalization takes a

perfectly spry verb and embalms it into a lifeless noun by adding a

suffix like –ance, –ment, or –ation. Instead of affirming an idea, you

effect its affirmation ; rather than postponing something, you

implement a postponement . Helen Sword calls them "zombie

nouns" because they lumber across the scene without a conscious

agent directing their motion. They can turn prose into a night of

the living dead. The phrase "assertions whose veracity was either

affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an

assessment word," for example, is infested with zombies. So is

"prevention of neurogenesis diminished social avoidance" (when we prevented neurogenesis, the mice no longer avoided other

mice).

The theory that academese is the opposite of classic style helps

explain a paradox of academic writing. Many of the most stylish

writers who cross over to a general audience are scientists

(together with some philosophers who are fans of science), while

the perennial winners of the Bad Writing Contest are professors of

English. That’s because the ideal of classic prose is congenial to

the worldview of the scientist. Contrary to the common

misunderstanding in which Einstein proved that everything is

relative and Heisenberg proved that observers always affect what

they observe, most scientists believe that there are objective truths

about the world, and that they can be discovered by a

disinterested observer.

By the same token, this guiding image of classic prose could not befarther from the worldview of relativist academic ideologies such

as postmodernism, poststructuralism, and literary Marxism, which

took over many humanities departments in the 1970s. Many of the

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winning entries in the Dutton contest (such as Judith Butler’s "The

move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood

to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a

view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to

repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question

of temporality into the thinking of structure ….") consist almost

entirely of metaconcepts.

For all its directness, classic style remains a pretense, an

imposture, a stance. Even scientists, with their commitment to

seeing the world as it is, are a bit postmodern. They recognize that

it’s hard to know the truth, that the world doesn’t just reveal itself

to us, that we understand the world through our theories and

constructs, which are not pictures but abstract propositions, and

that our ways of understanding the world must constantly be

scrutinized for hidden biases. It’s just that good writers don’t

flaunt that anxiety in every passage they write; they artfully

conceal it for clarity’s sake.

he other major contributor to academese is a cognitive blind

spot called the Curse of Knowledge: a difficulty in imagining

what it is like for someone else not to know something that you

know. The term comes from economics, but the general inability

to set aside something that you know but someone else does notknow is such a pervasive affliction of the human mind that

psychologists keep discovering related versions of it and giving it

new names: egocentrism, hindsight bias, false consensus, illusory

transparency, mind-blindness, failure to mentalize, and lack of a

theory of mind. In a textbook demonstration, a 3-year-old who

sees a toy being hidden while a second child is out of the room

assumes that the other child will look for it in its actual location

rather than where she last saw it. Children mostly outgrow the

inability to separate their own knowledge from someone else’s,

but not entirely. Even adults slightly tilt their guess about where a

person will look for a hidden object in the direction of where they

themselves know the object to be. And they mistakenly assume

that their private knowledge and skills—the words and facts they

know, the puzzles they can solve, the gadgets they can operate—

are second nature to everyone else, too.

The curse of knowledge is a major reason that good scholars writebad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to them that their readers don’t

know what they know—that those readers haven’t mastered the

patois or can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to


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mention or have no way to visualize an event that to the writer is

as clear as day. And so they don’t bother to explain the jargon or

spell out the logic or supply the necessary detail.

Obviously, scholars cannot avoid technical terms altogether. But a

surprising amount of jargon can simply be banished, and no one

will be the worse for it. A scientist who replaces murine model with

rats and mice will use up no more space on the page and be no less

scientific. Philosophers are every bit as rigorous when they put

away Latin expressions like ceteris paribus, inter alia , and

simpliciter, and write in English instead: other things being equal ,

among other things , and in and of itself .

Abbreviations are tempting to thoughtless writers because they

can save a few keystrokes every time they have to use the term. The

writers forget that the few seconds they add to their own lives

come at the cost of many minutes stolen from their readers. I stare

at a table of numbers whose columns are labeled DA DN SA SN,

and have to riffle back and scan for the explanation: Dissimilar

Affirmative, Dissimilar Negative, Similar Affirmative, Similar

Negative. Each abbreviation is surrounded by inches of white

space. What possible reason could there have been for the author

not to spell them out?

A considerate writer will also cultivate the habit of adding a few

words of explanation to common technical terms, as in

" Arabidopsis , a flowering mustard plant," rather than the bare

" Arabidopsis " (which I’ve seen in many science papers). It’s not

just an act of magnanimity; a writer who explains technical terms

can multiply his readership a thousandfold at the cost of a handful

of characters, the literary equivalent of picking up hundred-dollar

bills on the sidewalk. Readers will also thank a writer for the

copious use of for example , as in , and such as because an

explanation without an example is little better than no explanation

at all.

And when technical terms are unavoidable, why not choose ones

that are easy for readers to understand? Ironically, the field of

linguistics is among the worst offenders, with dozens of mystifying

technical terms: themes that have nothing to do with themes; PRO

and pro , which are pronounced the same way but refer to differentthings; stage-level and individual-level predicates , which are just

unintuitive ways of saying "temporary" and "permanent"; and

Principles A , B , and C , which could just as easily have been called


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the Reflexive Effect, the Pronoun Effect, and the Noun Effect.

But it’s not just opaque technical terms that bog down academese.

Take this sentence from a journal that publishes brief review

articles in cognitive science for a wide readership:

The slow and integrative nature of conscious perception

is confirmed behaviorally by observations such as the

"rabbit illusion" and its variants, where the way in which

a stimulus is ultimately perceived is influenced by

poststimulus events arising several hundreds of

milliseconds after the original stimulus.

The authors write as if everyone knows what "the rabbit illusion"

is, but I’ve been in this business for nearly 40 years and had never

heard of it. Nor does their explanation enlighten. How are wesupposed to visualize "a stimulus," "poststimulus events," and

"the way in which a stimulus is ultimately perceived"? And what

does any of that have to do with rabbits?

So I did a bit of digging and uncovered the Cutaneous Rabbit

Illusion, in which if you close your eyes and someone taps you a

few times on the wrist, then on the elbow, and then on the

shoulder, it feels like a string of taps running up the length of your

arm, like a hopping rabbit. OK, now I get it—a person’s conscious

experience of where the early taps fell depends on the location of

the later taps. But why didn’t the authors just say that, which

would have taken no more words than stimulus-this and

poststimulus-that?

Scholars lose their moorings in the land of the concrete because of

two effects of expertise that have been documented by cognitive

psychology. One is called chunking. To work around thelimitations of short-term memory, the mind can package ideas

into bigger and bigger units, which the psychologist George Miller

dubbed "chunks." As we read and learn, we master a vast number

of abstractions, and each becomes a mental unit that we can bring

to mind in an instant and share with others by uttering its name.

An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine

of reason, but it comes at a cost: a failure to communicate with

other minds that have not mastered the same chunks.

The amount of abstraction a writer can get away with depends on

the expertise of his readership. But divining the chunks that have


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been mastered by a typical reader requires a gift of clairvoyance

with which few of us are blessed. When we are apprentices in our

chosen specialty, we join a clique in which, it seems to us,

everyone else seems to know so much! And they talk among

themselves as if their knowledge were conventional wisdom to

every educated person. As we settle into the clique, it becomes our

universe. We fail to appreciate that it is a tiny bubble in amultiverse of cliques. When we make first contact with the aliens

in other universes and jabber at them in our local code, they

cannot understand us without a sci-fi universal translator.

A failure to realize that my chunks may not be the same as your

chunks can explain why we baffle our readers with so much

shorthand, jargon, and alphabet soup. But it’s not the only way we

baffle them. Sometimes wording is maddeningly opaque without

being composed of technical terminology from a private clique.

Even among cognitive scientists, for example, "poststimulus

event" is not a standard way to refer to a tap on the arm.

The second way in which expertise can make our thoughts harder

to share is that as we become familiar with something, we think

about it more in terms of the use we put it to and less in terms of

what it looks like and what it is made of. This transition is called

functional fixity. In the textbook experiment, people are given acandle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks, and are asked

to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax won’t drip onto the

floor. The solution is to dump the thumbtacks out of the box, tack

the box to the wall, and stick the candle onto the box. Most people

never figure this out because they think of the box as a container

for the tacks rather than as a physical object in its own right. The

blind spot is called functional fixity because people get fixated on

an object’s function and forget its physical makeup.

Now, if you combine functional fixity with chunking, and stir in

the curse that hides each one from our awareness, you get an

explanation of why specialists use so much idiosyncratic

terminology, together with abstractions, metaconcepts, and

zombie nouns. They are not trying to bamboozle their readers; it’s

just the way they think. The specialists are no longer thinking—

and thus no longer writing—about tangible objects, and instead

are referring to them by the role those objects play in their daily travails. A psychologist calls the labels true and false "assessment

words" because that’s why he put them there—so that the

participants in the experiment could assess whether it applied to


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the preceding sentence. Unfortunately, he left it up to us to figure

out what an "assessment word" is.

In the same way, a tap on the wrist became a "stimulus," and a tap

on the elbow became a "poststimulus event," because the writers

cared about the fact that one event came after the other and no

longer cared that the events were taps on the arm. But we readers

care, because otherwise we have no idea what really took place. A

commitment to the concrete does more than just ease

communication; it can lead to better reasoning. A reader who

knows what the Cutaneous Rabbit Illusion consists of is in a

position to evaluate whether it really does imply that conscious

experience is spread over time or can be explained in some other

way.

The curse of knowledge, in combination with chunking and

functional fixity, helps make sense of the paradox that classic style

is difficult to master. What could be so hard about pretending to

open your eyes and hold up your end of a conversation? The

reason it’s harder than it sounds is that if you are enough of an

expert in a topic to have something to say about it, you have

probably come to think about it in abstract chunks and functional

labels that are now second nature to you but are still unfamiliar to

your readers—and you are the last one to realize it.

he final explanation of why academics write so badly comes

not from literary analysis or cognitive science but from

classical economics and Skinnerian psychology: There are few

incentives for writing well.

When Calvin explained to Hobbes, "With a little practice, writing

can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog," he got it backward.

Fog comes easily to writers; it’s the clarity that requires practice.

The naïve realism and breezy conversation in classic style are

deceptive, an artifice constructed through effort and skill.

Exorcising the curse of knowledge is no easier. It requires more

than just honing one’s empathy for the generic reader. Since our

powers of telepathy are limited, it also requires showing a draft to

a sample of real readers and seeing if they can follow it, together

with showing it to yourself after enough time has passed that it’s

no longer familiar and putting it through another draft (or two orthree or four). And there is the toolbox of writerly tricks that have

to be acquired one by one: a repertoire of handy idioms and

tropes, the deft use of coherence connectors such as nonetheless


15/15

and moreover , an ability to fix convoluted syntax and confusing

garden paths, and much else.

You don’t have to swallow the rational-actor model of human

behavior to see that professionals may not bother with this costly

self-improvement if their profession doesn’t reward it. And by and

large, academe does not. Few graduate programs teach writing.

Few academic journals stipulate clarity among their criteria for

acceptance, and few reviewers and editors enforce it. While no

academic would confess to shoddy methodology or slapdash

reading, many are blasé about their incompetence at writing.

Enough already. Our indifference to how we share the fruits of our

intellectual labors is a betrayal of our calling to enhance the spread

of knowledge. In writing badly, we are wasting each other’s time,

sowing confusion and error, and turning our profession into a

laughingstock.

Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University,

chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and

author, most recently, of The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s

Guide to Writing in the 21st Century , just out from Viking.

351 Comments

• •

aloofbooks •

"Enough already. Our indifference to how we share the fruits of our intellectual

labors is a betrayal of our calling to enhance the spread of knowledge. In writing

badly, we are wasting each other’s time, sowing confusion and error, and turning

our profession into a laughingstock."

Agreed!

• •

nomorofodofo •

Not agreed, really. One worries about those who would readily upvote that

opinion, which obviously displays an ideology. I suspect now that we may

be dealing with a polarity not of clear/obscure but rather of

mediocre/complex. That many would upvote "clarity" because we are

uncomfortable by original thought is not inspiring. Of course, one need not

speak what one writes in books when lecturing or giving a public

presentation.

• •

minnesotan •

Complexity is not an end in itself. People create obscurantist prosefor reasons other than conveying their findings. Cui bono?

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